She thought he had the flu.
That’s what Kaycee Teets assumed when officials from Seminole Heights Elementary School called last year to tell her that her son, first grader Keith Coty, had a headache and was throwing up.
But when she got to the school, she says, everyone was frantic, and her son was lying on the ground. The boy died that day; Teets later learned he had a brain hemorrhage.
“To me, he was a healthy, happy 6-year-old child,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about it.”
She thinks he could have been saved had someone at the school performed chest compressions on the boy.
“As soon as I walked into that room I knew something was wrong,” she says. “Why aren’t they doing CPR? Why aren’t they doing something?”
Teets believes if every adult present had known CPR, Keith’s death could have been prevented. She’s in Tallahassee this week pushing for a bill that could prevent such nightmarish outcomes in the future.
Sponsored by State Senator Thad Altman, a Melbourne Republican, SB 328 would require all Florida high school students to have one hour of hands-only CPR training. It wouldn’t be as intensive as full CPR certification training, but organizations like the American Heart Association see it as a chance for young people to learn the lifesaving skill at little cost.
“That could save hundreds, thousands, of lives, just by teaching these kids,” says Teets. “It makes their families more safe, it makes people around them more safe.”
Dr. Robert Sanchez, a cardiologist with the Heart Institute in St. Petersburg, calls it a no-brainer.
“Over 420,000 people will suffer cardiac arrest on an annual basis. And of those people who suffer cardiac arrest, probably 90 percent will die of that cardiac arrest,” says Sanchez. “If we are able to perform CPR in a timely fashion, right at the time of the cardiac arrest, it will greatly increase the likelihood of survival.”
In places like Rochester, Minn., which has a “very robust community education program,” according to Sanchez, bystanders are more likely to perform CPR on someone having cardiac arrest, and to do so successfully. He says the survival rate there has gone up to 40 percent, or roughly four times the survival rate in places like Florida,
“Most people don’t [try CPR] because they’re not comfortable doing it,” he observes.
Despite the bill’s obvious benefits, SB 328 doesn’t have a co-sponsor, nor has it been taken up in committee.
It’s unclear why lawmakers don’t seem interested in picking it up. Their lack of enthusiasm may lie in the perception that it’s an unfunded mandate, albeit a relatively inexpensive one (the class requires that each school purchase a $100 CPR dummy). There’s also the question of who would teach the classes and how the instructors would be compensated.
Twenty other states have already figured this out, though, including every other state in the Southeast.
So, to Teets, the lack of interest among Florida’s legislators makes no sense.
“There’s only good that can come out of it,” she says. “I don’t care how big of a fight it is. I’m willing to fight as much as I
possibly can.”
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2015.